Feeling cold

A conversation between two strangers, overheard somewhere on the wild plains of the Internet.

BELIEVER: Why don’t you believe in anything?

ATHEIST: I’m not sure, I think it’s something you feel. I never tried to convince anyone of my own feelings. I think it’s as if you say, “Hey, I feel cold.” Someone will say, “Well, I feel warm.” And I go, “no, trust me, it’s cold in here.” I’ve just always felt cold, so to speak.

… I grew up in a religious household. They would say, “Oh, we need to pray before meals.” We would go to church, we would do all these things … I was like, “Why do I have to pray? I don’t feel like there’s anyone listening.” And so for me, it’s always just the way you feel. And I’ve always felt like there’s nothing there. But you were kind of the inverse. You said, your family didn’t really have religion, but you’ve at least got some sense of spirituality in your life. Does that come from experiences or gut?

BELIEVER: Kind of opposite of you – how you don’t feel like anyone’s there, I do feel like something’s there, someone has to be there.

ATHEIST: I get it.

BELIEVER: Yeah, I definitely feel that.

***

Surely the believer’s response cannot be right. For if faith is no more than a feeling, then it remains a strictly private affair, as we suggested in a previous post. If faith has no connection to reality, a gulf opens between you and me: we do not tread the same ground, we do not see by the same light.

Yet at the same time, isn’t the point of our feelings to respond to something out there? No matter how sensitive you and I may be, the cold I feel as I write this does not only say something about me. My senses awaken me to the presence (or absence) of something beyond. It is good to be able to celebrate the sun has come out.

Perhaps for this reason the Christian tradition warns us against the chief of spiritual evils — “lukewarmness”, to have become “neither cold nor hot”, in the intriguing expression of the book of the Apocalypse (3:15-16). God would have us be one or the other. The opposite is to have lost the ability to feel, to be moved by what comes our way. And to observe the world, instead, from the calculated numbness of our indifference.

Photography: Zurriola beach in San Sebastián (Spain) by Ion Flecha.